We don't often consider the ethics of telling our story. Mother's Day email reminders opened my eyes to the challenges of storytelling in the digital age. Not long after my mom died in April last year, an email came from the local florist reminding me to send flowers.
There is a right way and a wrong way to apologize. A poorly executed apology can make a bad situation worse.
I don't know about you but I am tired of a black and white world that squeezes out the shades of gray. We live in a culture where everything seems to be “either/or.” It is us vs. them. For or against. My way or the highway. Fragmentation and confrontation occurs in every aspect of our lives.
Information about our organizations and our employees flows freely across the Internet in ways we don't expect. A medium-sized start-up doing business globally – let’s call them New Company – wanted to promote new hire, Susan, someone they had snagged from Big Competitor.
Messaging is critical to getting your point across. While executives and their teams talk about the importance of powerful messaging, many people don’t really understand what messages are.
Most enterprises approach communication from a “Prism of Me,” as opposed to a “Prism of Value.” Think of it this way. A prism takes white light and refracts it to create Technicolor rays.
After a few hours of staring at the blank Word document on my screen, I had had enough. My creative writing was hardly that. I was starting to surf the Internet for Real Housewives gossip and knew I needed an intervention.
Imagine you had to pay $100 for every word, whether in email or conversation. Would it change the way you write and speak? Odds are we’d be much briefer. So much of our online and spoken discourse is filled with unnecessary words.
They say that those closest to us are often the last to know things. Nowhere is that more true than within our own companies and organizations. Internal communications is often an afterthought.
Email is the communication tool we all love to hate. It’s fast, inexpensive, convenient and effective. It also is overused or used inappropriately. From sports teams to fashion retailers to political candidates, everyone, it seems, wants my attention and my dollars.
